In the Shadow of the American Dream (16 page)

July 6, 1979 (cont.)

Later John went into the bathroom and Dirk set me up on the wall to photograph my T-shirt and tux jacket and stuff with flashlights in semidarkness and color slides, the swirling of camera lens around the flashlight and then delayed flash and captured image of body and shirt and hand and light and then in the bathroom against the black walls and white tiles of the wall next to the sink, I showed Dirk my childhood trick of placing my chin over my shoulder bone and leaning back the displaced sense of body rearrangement and he got weirded out: Ugly, and snapped some shots, got an idea from his cheap toilet paper of wetting and applying it like papier-mache and covered a side of my face, mouth, and one half of my glasses and went out while the two of them were in conversation and sat on bed till John turned and saw it and giggled and Dirk said, Oh god, and then more photos, one of John holding a white square board like some Devo-esque teacher from the recent future, then a shot of me against the board as John holds it, kinda like exhibit A or B or Z … we left afterwards and ate in Tiffany's coffee shop with this bullheaded waiter who had perfected the art of being bored and exasperated, rolling of eyes and long sighs and all as he took our order and served us the stuff, three no-wave women behind us in the next booth with black short razored hair and gold-black circles around their eyes and cheap plastic black-and-white bulby earrings and sleazo clothes, neat lookin' and they left after flashin' us some lingering stares, over to the other side in a booth were two women on quaaludes nodding out over eggs and toast, chewing with eyes closed for minutes at a time, and the rattle of cars on the street, the crowds drifting by, one girl who was stunned tripped and dropped her radio which shattered into various pieces and got up smiling and walked on … we headed for the river afterwards and this was where along the bank street pier that John said what he felt and I felt nervous as hell, the whole rearrangement of the way I have always related to him, explained some of it to him, he was nervous too, of course, as I could imagine, but my senses got intense and it felt like the first time I'd ever been moving towards a sexual scene, pit in my stomach tightening up and the racing of senses—we walked back along the docks and reentered the pier warehouse and moved to the back and stood in the darkness, all along the walls the sides of the pier opened out like loading and unloading dock doorways and sections of the cold night river shimmering and breezing along and every so often the slow swing of illuminating car lamps from the distance entering the warehouse and playing over the interior walls, lighting up sections of fallen boards and glass fractured and scattered along the ways, the slow calm movement of water, the shudder of it beneath the wind, the crosscurrents whirling into knots and the sight of city streets and highways and lampposts glittering in the far-off night and landscape and John said, Ya know, David, I really wanna kiss ya, and I said, Whew, and stood there dumbly for a second and then abandoned the nervousness best as I could and we kissed and then embraced and felt my hands running smooth over his jacket then sliding beneath the jacket under his shirt over his shoulders while his hands touched various parts of my back and ran along and we stopped for a breath, the disordering of past senses, the idea of images blown away as in an earlier conversation along the river wall on the side of this warehouse, in a manmade cove of warehouses and he talked about last night at Hurrah's dancing with me and with Brian and the sense of blowing the ideas contained in being friends, the intense symbolism of removing ties of fear, the real sense of it as emergence into new areas and explorations and jesus the exciting prospects and possibilities contained in that kinda action … I had a copy of William Burroughs's
the Algebra of Need
balanced on the ledge of the closed unloading dock door next to where we stood as we started getting it on we got involved, the situation becoming more and more intense and hot, the idea that if I was ever gonna make it with a guy that I loved and knew previously as a traveling buddy that this place in the predawn hours had to be the one right place in this fuckin' city to do it, the sense of foreign displacement in accordance with my body and mind, the environment following with the change of head, and I lifted up his shirt and kissed him on the chest and ran my tongue down his sides and around his neck and felt with my palms and fingers all around his legs and back and face and it got more intense till we knocked off the book from the ledge and it slammed with a loud bang on the floor, soon after there were voices, sounded like tough rip-off characters, a small gang of voices, the projection of fear in the form of cut throats, we stood there in the darkness rearranging our shirts and jackets and pants, zipping up and buckling up and listening for the direction of their voices, high-pitched pseudofeminine shrieks asking indecipherable questions, the mal intent contained within the sound finally we eased outside into the river walkway, walked frantically back and forth trying to figure how to get away or what to do, the voices looming suddenly real close and we sat down against the door where moments before we'd been on the other side: Imagine a force field, a field of protective energy, our heads ran away, the slow dawn was beginning to be apparent on the outer traces of horizon, I was thinking mass energy, white fields of light, protective energy, the voices got closer, felt claustrophobic on the edge of the great river on the edge of the great city, massive distances come and gone, the great endless sky and felt claustrophobic like, no place to run, they finally came tittering out a number of yards away, a bunch of queens looking for people fuckin' around, bored of waiting endless hours in the upper-floor corridors for the necessary animal embrace, they came down looking for it, looking to disrupt it if possible and guess they didn't see us—they rattled around the walls for a while, giggling and shrieking and John and I sighed and laughed quietly and realized the projection of fears in our heads, and yet the possibilities it could've been, talked about throwing them in the river were we to start fighting, jumping in ourselves if need be, finally walked around inside looking for a quiet place to get it on, went out the back of the wall door and stretched out on the asphalt of the dock and talked and smoked a cigarette and I ran my hand over him and stretched out and then the dawn was on its way up with lightening colors of sky, a rusty tinge of red-orange coming up behind the factory across the way, the one past the next pier, the two simultaneous stacks almost merged with one another in the perspective of sight and growing a brown brick color, emerging from the darkness into the coming dawn, shadows slowly easing away, the water with small almost indiscernible flickering lines, like schools of fish just beneath the surface racing along and surging but not yet moving further but where they were, turmoils of water, and easing his pants down we looked over our shoulders and there was some young guy standing there surveying the scene like we weren't part of it, how long he was watching I don't know but with a weary shake of heads we got up and readjusted our clothes and slipped back into the warehouse, walked around a bit, watched the intense visuals of dawn, the elevated structure of the Westside Highway and the burning lampposts, the incineration of the dawn, the backdrop domelike sky over the city lightening and the water turning to an azure blue, to turquoises and silvers, the merging of blood rust reds into the surfaces as if dawn were a flaming vehicle come rolling down across the plains and highways to step slowly into the river of time, the Indian giver of moments, the pulling in and the pushing forward, the continuance of senses, the changes that have rolled up and in and pulled me along since my return from the quiet city of Paris, the lonesome city and the darkness that shuts off my sense of abandonment in that faraway place—we walked into the back part of the warehouse, outside where the cove was, the U-shaped arena of warehouse walls and windows, along the ledge where there was miraculously some kinda cheap rug, dollar a yard kinda rug stretched over the ledge and dry and we lay down and watched the dawn rising in the windows and whole landscapes emerging from the disappearing night, the burning of lampposts in the now gathering dawn and somewhere out there were two huge metal barges filled with stuff I couldn't make out, bobbing and drifting in the river as huge waves pulled in from passing tugs and barges and small ships and the moon long gone and the open doorways of the warehouse across the way revealing orange vehicles, trucks and forklifts and crates and still burning lights and John asked me to stand up after I caressed him and ran my mouth and tongue over his chest and down into his belly and further down as I pulled his pants back and I stood up and the dawn light was intense, the revelation of the night before, the landscapes we'd drifted through, the zombie presence of men drifting back and forth in the dispelling of Rechy's myth that dawn was the quietest hour when all cruising ended and streets were empty, he embraced me kneeling down and I felt hot streaks of excitement rising up and overpowering my limbs, felt weak and dizzy both of us at times did, felt awed by the placement of ourselves in this light, the sense of his mouth warm and smooth, hands sliding over bare legs and somewhere in those moments I came and felt totally drained of all energy and tension and wanted to drop to my knees and lie there thinking for hours on end, instead we arranged our clothes and sat down and lit a cigarette and mused out loud about the last fifteen hours or so and the sense of life and loving and explosion of images and experiencing of senses … the world trade center, the very top of it emerging into a dim sunlight of rising dawn, it was framed by crossbars of metal on top of the far warehouse roof and it was like some kinda vision in all of this, in this morning and night and actions and touching and senses allowed to surface in long continual slides of motion … we sat there talking about both of us and Brian and the things we'll someday do in the form of street actions and creative energies and maybe ultimately in the form of band work, the sexual senses in growing up, the pleasurable scenes in the night and dawn, the senses of ourselves with women, the continuation of the senses in that, the pleasure of various acts and movements and somewhere along the way we rose up and entered the warehouse and went back upstairs and walked the hallways and the rooms and the group of queens who had disrupted us before sat around on the floor and left as we entered and somewhere in there someone said, David, and I turned and it was some guy I once knew and had written something for and never bothered to see again after my return for unknown reasons, and we left finally and walked over to Sheridan Square to a coffee shop and had breakfast and talked of diseases and of other things and then hit the subway and went our separate ways and crashed in our own ways in our own homes in our own beds and slept.

New York City, October 1979

October 8, 1979

Visited the river again this evening, red traces of dusk far behind the sea green walls of Jersey shipping warehouses, red aura glow inside the pier warehouse walking from room to room, dusk through busted walls getting cruised by lanky queens, searching for the man from Texas, looked through the blue night halls, the warm rooms with pale filmic images of men in boots fucking other men in corners, the ghosts of leather jackets and boys with pasty faces behind concrete walls slow movements extending from shoulder to elbow to wrist, drifting images of desire range rogue desire in the irises immersed in shadow like the folds of river water over the face, seas in fading light, the dead man falling fathoms, the live man falling fathoms, the long lingering sight, the stare into folds of depth of unbreathing moisture, the erotic sense of withdrawal behind misty walls of concrete, the image of sense seen in their eyes not invisible to me, the scene obscured by walls and shadow, the man from Texas wasn't there. I drifted, turned on heel in doorways, lit matches to give sparks to cigarettes, pushed away hands, walked the stone cliff walls of the warehouse exterior and made my way into a bar on the waterfront down the highway. The first few minutes being confronted with exciting images and realizing them to be false, to be costume and pose, to be nonexistent in such environments. Realizing with the Texan man, the sense he evoked in the meeting, the senses I've been left with that are a bit unsettling, unsettling in their intoxicating beauty, in their rarity, the sense that I'd gladly give this stranger my soul my life my time in movement in living for the rest of my life, would live with him immediately, the giving away of preoccupation or routine to be finely held in the mind and rough hands of a stranger, this produced in the meeting a series of movements along a darkening hall, the heavy sound of footsteps, the casual swagger of a character turning on the silent balls of his feet, the motion toward me erasing the definition of “stranger” making us less than strangers, the cocking of his head to the side, healthiness of the light in his eyes, the broad face, nose. How it is I'd give my life for/to him, not a sense of ego or egolessness, my life being very important to me in personal freedoms, but like riding in a truck through the images of Texas, the badlands, the rolling vistas the buttes cactus and fine sands of timelessness, the ever-present rouge line on metal, the continuous dusk at our feet, the guns over the visors, the bullets in the dashboard, the riding riding motion of the senses, realizing the futility of ever really creating this act, this act of merging physically and psychically with this man from Texas, the impossibility of it, for in the repetition of these scenes it would no longer be present, this intoxication, this sense of unlimited possibilities in the stopping of time and aging this controlled recklessness in pursuit of time distance light and landscape. But still again the possibility of doing this with this man, doing it or having the sense of being able to do it only because of the unlikeliness of it ever occurring, like there is a chance that someday in these New York streets I might bump into him again and get it on again, get it on in the same ruggedly sensitive way, the beauty of visuals and all they evoke, what those minutes in the dim dusk hallway light gave me, what sense of my past and my desires they opened up. It's the sense of possibility in living life the way I've wanted to live it—never really having lived the life I've wanted, never having that control of destinies or scenes or motions or moments, no one ever having that (thus the excitement in it). Really it's this lawlessness and anonymity simultaneously that I desire, living among thugs, but men who live under no degree of law or demand, just continual motion and robbery and light roguishness and motion, reading Genet out loud to the falling sun overlooking the vast lines of the desert receding into dusk and darkness, drugs and aimlessness, the senseless striving to be something, the huge realization of the senselessness of that conscious attempt in the midst of the way this living is really constructed, the word
constructed
not even being sensible, unreal, the endless forms of chance and possibility as an alternative to construction, the free floating in time/space/image, the futility and impossibility in even subscribing to the definition of it for even in the definition in the construction of words is the inherent failure to obtain the living sense of the desire. So although I've lived forms of movement that approach or start to come close to the scenes I desire, the life I desire, still when all is said and done, just as in the construction of these words I have still not touched the edge of it. Thus in the visual scenes, the erotic senses evoked by the meeting of this man in the darkening halls of the pier warehouse, in those odd moments where the walls were on fire with the heat of his body, with the heat of his associations headwise and physically, in all of this witnessed by the hermaphrodite along the wall clattering noiselessly into the future on Magic Marker high heels, was I given a reprieve in the impossibility of actually living my life as it should be, as my sensibilities demand, thus the momentary departure into time and distance, the sense of myself living in controlled recklessness within the pure sound embraced by his body and mind as in the uttering of the word
Texas
rolling off his tongue and lips in the change of shadows and light, his eyes perceiving me cast on the fiery night of receding deserts and seas, the motion of the gray river in the rain, the sound of tireless traffic in the wet streets. The possibility inherent in impossibility. The sense of slight chance in a future time when elements fall together in random order providing the entranceway through all of life and death but only with the body so inextricably entwined with the pull of desire and motion and distance that the senses run on a thin wire of fire unstrung, unsung and believable (livable).